


Infinite Tsukuyomi

by ghostwit



Category: Naruto
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Complicated Relationships, Getting Together, Just a longer recovery time for Yamato in which he's still partially under the tsukuyomi post-war, LOTS of mokuton in this one. I am a man of enduring tastes., M/M, Mutual Pining, Post-Fourth Shinobi War, there is some implication of past intimacy but it is vague, vaguely
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:07:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,823
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27474736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghostwit/pseuds/ghostwit
Summary: The Konoha hospital is ever-familiar. Tenzo, happuri and all, is ever familiar.
Relationships: Hatake Kakashi/Yamato | Tenzou
Comments: 10
Kudos: 35





	Infinite Tsukuyomi

**Author's Note:**

> The first ~1600 words written: July 7th, 2019  
> The rest was cleaned up and tacked on over the past couple weeks. You can tell because I use a smaller range of epithets, ahah. 
> 
> Finished this up at 4AM so forgive errors right now if you can manage O__O

Yamato had been recovered somewhere in the middle of the battlefield, prone in the dirt as the countless shinobi around him began struggling to their feet. His legs had begun to atrophy, his arms scant of muscle and his neck tight from the continual downward strain offering him no aid as he willed himself to move, dragging in stuttering increments against the grit of the battlefield. 

He felt almost as if he was watching himself be lifted when someone, someone from Kumo, he thinks, had helped him to his feet. Another nin, someone from Kiri, he couldn't tell, had come up on his left as he struggled to stand. The contact buzzed and shot across his skin, disgusting and rolling and raw, but seeing the headbands simply marked "shinobi" made something warm bloom in his chest. He smiled weakly, mouthing a _thank you_ before kneeling over and retching bile into the dust.

* * *

The Konoha hospital is ever-familiar. Tenzo, happuri and all, is ever familiar. He looks like he had as a child, naive despite the concealing of his wide eyes in restless sleep, a landscape defined by jutting bone rather than the svelte muscle of his adult years, cast with the almost sickly white of dwelling in the dark which he'd finally begun to lose in his time with Team 7. Even here, handsome with harsh set brows and a masculine jawline, but small, small, _weak_. His chakra simmers low, bumping dangerously with the bottom of his reserves; yet, the restless spirit of the First Hokage still manages to manifest. 

Kakashi had never seen it quite this bad, something to do with what had happened to him, the slow eking of his power for the duration of the war and the months before, he supposes. 

The bleak hospital room has been interspersed with greenery; soft, organic things which a waking Tenzo always struggled with, his own aptitudes leaning towards sanded surfaces and right angles. Dogwood lazily loops his wrists, bark turning easy circles and pulling the meat of his forearms taut, the white of the petals hardly contrasting his feverish skin except where the wood ran a tight ellipse around his left wrist, the skin a raw pink. Single hyacinth buds the color of day old bruises grew up between his ears, straining against his faceplate and tenderly tucking themselves against his cheekbones. Solitary, bloody shreds of amaryllis petals scattered themselves over his collar and throat as the flowers waxed and waned with the sporadic flow and bursts of Tenzo's chakra. Ranunculus grew in rowdy yellow bunches over the rails of the hospital bed, buttercup and asiatica spilling from the sides as if it were a delicately arranged window display, just barely pulsing in time with the distant pull of the captain’s chakra. 

Patients and various staff had begun leaving their own ailing plants in the room, trusting the unconscious man to bring them back to beautiful, flowering health, regardless of the season. Some had even been so bold as to start gathering the blossoms growing at his sides. Sakura had watched one girl, recently orphaned, reach for a flower: A rumpled, delicate statice growing on a thin stalk between the man's fingers, watched the bloom strain upwards towards her fingers ever so slightly, watched it slump with almost a sigh of relief and twist happily as she walked away with it. 

Sakura made a mental note to leave her captain's door open, though she didn't miss the dilation of Kakashi's eyes and the tightening of his shoulders. She’d never pegged her sensei as the jealous type. 

The reverence of having the mokuton user in the ward as some sort of verdant miracle despite the familiarity with wood style as simply another ninja art is something that Kakashi was sure Yamato would enjoy, a kind of attention he hardly shoulders even as he allows his delicate love of architecture to mark the homes of many. He is pretty like this, handsome among his own efflorescence, colorful and sharpened by contrast, the white of the room, the sheets, his languid throat and clammy face set against an ever-changing array of flowers of every color he could imagine. Lost in the liminal spaces of consciousness and allowing his withering chakra to fill the gaps in scenery. 

The hospital bed reminds him of a burial pall. 

The body: pale, small, weak, and, worst of all, peaceful, smothered in a sea of pity and color. Drowning in life, letting the essence of it be leached out of him for the sake of a smiling orphan and a couple potted plants. With every visit, Kakashi fights the terseness in his gut which begs him to act, however fruitlessly, rip his kouhai from the bed, which to him reeked so heavily with the heady stench of death beyond the aroma of the flowers. _If Tenzo could only have an ounce of his selfishness..._ The deep settling of familiar uselessness in his abdomen which follows afterwards always hurts worse than the initial impulse. 

The dog-nin lets his calloused fingers catch on the silky yellow curtain of flora over the left side of Tenzo's bed as he lowers himself into the plastic chair perpetually positioned at his side, pulled close enough that Kakashi's knees have to tuck under the bed's side rail. He fights the churning, bitter anger in his core as he rolls the supple flowers in his fingers, bringing enough chakra to their tips so that he can feel Tenzo's surging in kind, coming to meet him with utmost faith and diffusing his shame. 

The flowers, scented with decay as they were, were the only testaments to the fact that Tenzo is still alive, lucid somewhere in there, he reminded himself. He sighs, sparing a glance to the door which he'd gingerly shut and slips his mask down, lowering his face to his fingers and enveloping himself in the flowers. 

"Mmm," He looks up, curbing his surprise into an easy, excited smile, former sharingan eye squeezed shut into a happy little half-moon out of habit. Tenzo looks over at him, pupils dilating, blinks thrice, and lays his head back down with a quiet groan. Kakashi stifles a laugh over Tenzo's quiet _unfair_ ; the mokuton user’s eyes are bright enough that he trusts him to stay awake just a little lounger, but he prefers to be cautious. This is their first truly lucid exchange since the end of the war. 

His kouhai tilts his head back up to look at him, take in his smile, before reaching across to begin dragging the cloth bunched around his clavicle up his throat. The greenery shifts and shivers as he moves. Yamato takes his unconscious work in with a fond ease until the tap of Kakashi's hand draws his attention back up to his senpai, reminds him why he never wanted to look away in the first place. 

"It's fine, the door is shut." Tenzo quirks an eyebrow, but he lowers his hand to his side without further protest, though not sparing a glancing swipe of his thumb to the birthmark on the copy nin's chin. Kakashi inhales gently, and Tenzo speaks, if only to fill the silence.

“How long’ve I been out?” he slurs a little, the clear, metallic resonance of his voice rusted by disuse. Kakashi slumps forward, reaching into the pouch at his hip to pull the dog-eared novel from its resting place. He has no plans to read, but he knows from experience to keep his eyes occupied. 

“Little over a week,” Seven days, fourteen hours. His eyes scanned the page he’d opened to, letting his thumb run over the seam at the center of the book. 

“Mm… getting there.” He’s smiling tentatively. Before that had been thirteen days, twelve hours.

“They’ll discharge you if you can just stay awake for twelve hours, I’ve heard.” Yamato slips his hand under the rail and through the veil of foliage. 

“I’m not quite so eager to leave as you are, senpai.” His index finger skims the thumb running soothing circles at the book’s crease.

Bone-deep tiredness which accompanied the chakra exhaustion has made Tenzo particularly sentimental, though they suppose this ease between the two of them was nothing new. Something about this, the sharp feeling of borrowed time and desperation which had brought their noses flush in the bloody haze of missions past mingling with the too-clean scent of the hospital and the lush light filtering through the foliage overwhelming the glass and playing over Tenzo’s limp form. The steady rotations of the past couple months, sunlight parting veils of climbing hydrangea and moonlight spearing beyond curtains of bougainvillea in turns to set the comatose man in stained-glass glow, have made Kakashi almost selfish, Tenzo bold. 

He curls his finger ever so slightly to dig under the cloth of the older man’s glove, and Kakashi smiles into his lap, lifting his thumb to run it over the man’s hand instead, still playing gentle circles over the skin-- somewhat rough, nearly the same shade as the paper. 

“Not so eager, hmm..?” he teases, and the mokuton user is cast the shade of his dogwood, his warm eyes diverting to the window over the flush darkening the bridge of his nose. Kakashi takes his hand fully in his, letting his book slide closed into the gap between his thighs, the laminate cover squeaking softly against the starchy fabric of his jounin blues and snapping softly as it shuts, muffled by the loose cloth. 

“You’re cruel, senpai.” He’s smiling as Kakashi rolls his fingers between his, their callouses catching and scars glancing each other--a thousand stories skipping and skimming past each other in a small moment of intimacy. 

“Senpai, Tenzo?” The copy-nin’s fingers are longer, more delicate than Tenzo’s, skinny and fragile in a way unfit for shinobi, almost out of place on his lethal body, wiry and kinked as it was. _Maybe they did make a nice parallel_ , Tenzo muses as a knobby pinky, bent just the slightest bit leftwards and eternally pinkened from being singed by countless _raikiri_ runs over his, thinking of the man’s crooked posture and arcing scars. 

“Lord Sixth, then?” Yamato’s hands are blunter, those of workmen, thick nails and dense skin, yet incredibly precise. 

They stay like that a while, letting the names and title ring heavy in the air with a warm finality, the familiar making way for the future with linked arms and easy smiles until something in his countenance shifts. It’s barely a furrow of the brow no more than a twitch and a tightening of the knuckles imperceptible had Kakashi not already had his hands clasped between his own. “You know, I--” 

The nurse at the door flares her chakra politely, and Tenzo tenses minutely, throat tightening with a sudden, childish desperation to keep the moment--Kakashi, barefaced and warm against him, smiling. Kakashi runs his thumb along the ridges of his knuckles, smoothing over the callouses as he ducks his head into the dense curtain of yellow blooms, buries his nose and throat that makes the younger startle into an impossibly fonder smile.

The woman strides into the room with a smile, laugh bare and delighted when the nin hacks into the blooms, spraying petals about with the force of his cough, Tenzo wincing and stroking their knit hands in consolation. The smell is strong this close, undiffused by overly deliberate hospital ventilation and the wafting notes of the other flowers in the room, sweet and tickling, but it’s so very _Tenzo_ that he keeps his head tucked low, nudging his forehead against their joined hands as the nurse takes vitals. Her step is careful around the rokudaime, seeing his pale throat bared and averting her gaze, knowing it’s not for her. 

“Sorry,” she breathes, pressing the pads of her fingers into the tender space in the joint of his elbow, prying away a dogwood vine with medical delicacy. Yamato’s other arm tenses in his hand--ah, he wants to lift it, scratch behind his head in a gesture of good nature. Kakashi lifts his gaze to catch the edge of his smile and laughed _don’t worry about it, haha._ Kakashi’s eyes crinkle in turn, and the younger flushes, a lovely return of color to his pallor, turns his head away with a huff. 

“What is it you were saying?” Kakashi’s lips brush Tenzo’s knuckles on incidence, skin soft and bone below firm in the yielding veil of asiatica and he shudders, arms twitching in place with something unknown. 

“I…” He’s still turned away and flushing, and Kakashi’s smile twists a couple degrees teasing from the bedside. The nurse clears her throat and steps from the room, bowing at the door to the pair. Yamato, ever polite, lends her a nod of the head. Kakashi’s refusal to acknowledge her is staunch, but not particularly rude, simply another quirk of behavior as he narrows in on the dip of Yamato’s crown, the way it creases the pillow and shifts too-long hair grown unruly without a waking hand to tend it. 

"You were there." Yamato says, hoarse, breathless on the ends with his tongue too dry in his mouth, leaden with wanting. Kakashi straightens, reaches for his book to prop it up again. _He wasn’t anywhere, especially not for Tenzo._ The thought curdles behind his ears and the air goes thick between them, too many breaths--thoughts--withheld and spinning as the foliage cycles oxygen for a few laden beats. 

“Kakashi, it’s--it’s like I’m still,” the younger gasps, name soft on his tongue and blinking hard, and his hand slides through the railing again, brushing his fingertips over the garish cover, reaching. 

The moment is brief and brilliant and Kakashi can feel his gut drop, like his sternum is pulling to his feet and suctioning air all the way through his body, and he understands even before the other man says anything; That’s how they always go, how they’ve been going since Kakashi had felt that irreconcilable throb in his blood as young flesh roiled into splintering brown, the sudden compulsion of total completion. 

_You were there. Kakashi. It’s like I’m still._

(Yamato, dazed and coughing between bracketing flora, rose vines spidering his forehead and gouging lines in his hitai-ate, running so thick that the attendants have begun hacking them away, despite the way the comatose man winces. His eyelids had fluttered against the near-purple hollows of his under eyes, drooling and spluttering. He had looked up at Kakashi with pure liquid adoration, even under the hazy cast to his usually bright stare, enough to make the guilty sting of bile settle at his tonsils. He’d reached for him, much like he had now, _like he was his._ )

“The Tsukuyomi?” Kakashi breathes, the apprehension stringing him tense plunged past fear and into something earthly men like himself aren’t wont to touch, scrambled beyond blood and carnage and into the delicacy of the flora that brushes his knees. He trundles through, feeling pushing into action before it catches his limbs, “Do, do we need to do a scan for--”

“Yeah,” Tenzo’s answer cuts his line of rationale short, “I’ve been dreaming of you. Ever since.” The same breathless tone, but with a resigned sense to it, something in the way the words wisp into hoarseness on the ends, and another one of those shakes of the head--when did his kouhai become so fond of those? Kakashi feels lost, even as elation writhes under his skin.

“It’s embarrassing, isn’t it?” he laughs, and the motion makes his pupils quiver, the muscle in his neck spasming against the pillow. “Even after so long, you’re… still…” He’s laughing still, but he’s slipping under again, Kakashi can tell by the way there’s chakra funneling through every one of the plants surrounding them, shifting restless to pull him back through the filmy surface of reality, into one where--where Kakashi Hatake loves him. _Still everything I want._

“ _Tenzo,_ ” he gasps, because he’s selfish, and always has been, and because Yamato, somehow, doesn’t mind and never has, “no, _no_ , stay with me.” The captain keeps laughing, muted and clotted with the leaves winding afresh from his nape, but he smiles at the name. 

“It’s okay, senpai, you’re allowed to… to laugh…” he mutters, pupils still shaking as they dilate to fill the whites of his eyes, lilting with the dull wash of the Tsukuyomi that’s hooked brambles in his consciousness. It’s the same deathbed desperation sparking in his limbs, demanding he can’t let him go, not this time, absurdly, and the same guilt that turns them to lead. 

“It’s not fair of me,” he mutters, droning on with a lack of control uncharacteristic of the man with disciplined drill through his roots by a life in the darkness, “to be… after everything that’s my… while Konoha needs…” 

Yamato blinks twice, smiling still as his head lolls back, and it’s so scarily _final_ that Kakashi grabs his hand, lets the softcover novel slip from his lap and onto the floor with a slap, and sends a jolt of lightning chakra through his fingers. The smell of flora frying singes the air, tickles his nose in a way so unlike the previous bombardment of scent. 

“Tenzo,” he says, and his heart clenches at the way his pupils narrow to pinpricks with the full-body start the chakra injection gives him, and then, as his gaze lands on Kakashi’s bared face, dilate, “stay here. You have me here.” 

He says it, and it is true. Every complicated thought, every reservation keeping their entangled lives from joining is made small, inconsequential in the face of simple fact. He could almost laugh at himself, giddy with the way the frenzied confession unpins the blood-swollen wings from his back.

“Lord Sixth,” he says, still slurred and face aflame over a dopily cocked grin, running their conversation through a familiar loop in a way that makes Kakashi’s chest stir with a mirthful pride. 

“You have me here, Tenzo.” He says, gripping their joined hands so firmly he can hear the bone beneath creaking, unable to keep his own flush from spreading begonia blush across the bridge of his nose, “so come back to me, okay?” He manages a smile just like the thousands spared for Tenzo before, trusting and consoling both. 

Yamato turns to him, brows furrowed with pleading and smile frail on the edges, making him look impossibly young, even younger than the IV drip physique has made him seem. His throat catches on the words, “Can I… really…” 

“You can, you can.” Kakashi’s on the verge of pleading, his own smile faltering, and had the captain been any more lucid, he’d be beaming. Instead, he manages a nod, an exhaled _okay._

His eyelids flutter shut again, and the next exhale is deep and slow. Kakashi is crushed under the weight of that exhale, despair turning his stomach loose, dizzy again with that utter uselessness. He knows, distantly, that this isn’t the lifeless weight of another comrade in his arms, but something about it is acutely, painfully resonant. It’s too much.

In his palm unwinds a single flowering branch, five-petaled blooms clustered about the length and buzzing with Tenzo’s chakra, warm between the joined creases of their hands. He exhales the suspended breath in his throat, kept there to keep from hitching into an unseemly sob, and slumps down in the chair. His legs slide beneath the hospital bed, sandal scooting the abandoned novel a couple inches on the tile. He tilts his head skyward. 

* * *

“Yo, Tenzo,” he whisks into the room on false casualness betrayed by the Hokage robes still swishing at his heels, tilting his head and throwing deuces at the man who sits up in full now, six hours into this stint of consciousness. Fresh out of an unavoidable meeting, he’d shunshin’d 

“Hatake-senpai,” Tenzo says, and bows his head, hands folded politely in his lap. The greenery’s retreated, dancing along the window frames and laying in trimmed heaps along the counter on the far side of the room, disengaged from his chakra network. The mere sight of it brightens Kakashi’s face. Yamato smiles, spine straightening until he takes note of the older’s manner of dress, “Or, um, Lord--”

“Hey, none of that,” Kakashi says, crossing the room crawling onto the bed to sit with his thighs over the other’s, spilling white on white with the layers of cloth that cover the both of them. He peels his mask down his throat with an easy flourish, the twist of the wrist as easy as his exhale. 

Yamato flushes at the jigsaw arrangement, but used to Kakashi’s antics, only responds with a muttered, “Hey, you know they need to lock these things in place if you’re gonna be pushing weight around on them.” He turns his head away in embarrassment and Kakashi snickers under his breath, rooting beneath his robes. His gaze still manages to catch on the birthmark on Kakashi’s chin with a private fondness, though, as always.

“Hey, what does this one mean?” Kakashi says, producing the branch from his pocket, unwilted and radiating warmth. Yamato’s face, close and framed handsomely with the grey border of his happuri is much the same, and Kakashi makes no effort to suppress the happy chirp it summons in the base of his throat. 

“Why don’t you ask a Yamanaka for these things…” he grumbles and, oh, yeah, his lovely kohai is definitely back. In typical lovely kohai fashion, he responds anyway, eyes widening, “It’s, um, almond, Hatake-senpai.” His breath staggers in his throat, crispened with emotion, “Symbolizing promise. Oh. Was that…?”

“Real?” Kakashi supplies with handsomely quirked brow, shifting his legs so he can lean even further on the younger, let the heat of the word fan over his face. He reaches forward to clasp both hands laying in the captain’s lap, no longer bound in foliage, and winds them around his own waist, resting them in the small of his back. “You’ve always been quick, Tenzo, tell me.” 

Yamato dodges the kiss--the kiss he’s spent a decade dreaming of, and a decade more in just these past few months with the coma tumbling him through wash cycle wish fulfillment--turns his cheek so Kakashi presses his lips to his cheek bone with enough force to knock him prone against the hospital sheets. He laughs this time, too, but it is bright and teeming with a thousand words needlessly unspoken that flutter out the open window and into the breeze, carrying on the sound. _You’ve always had me_.

Kakashi tucks his head against the dip of his Adam’s apple, the other seemingly unbothered by his weight resting fully on his still-recovering form and laughs along with him. He knows, gratitude beyond the impossible depth of their shared years making him slot into the space like an overdue homecoming. 

_Let’s always come back. Let’s stay together._

**Author's Note:**

> Old work so forgive all the huge paragraphs and maybe stilted prose and that little style shift at the end where I added a chunk on to round it off >__>I hope you can enjoy anyway! Damn, I used to be so conceptually ambitious, this shit was so hard to tie up--It actually went in a direction I did NOT plan at all LOOOL, it's not as bittersweet as I wanted it to be, urghhh--and I'm NOT happy with it at all but I can always rewrite it, I guess urghh T__T
> 
> Please leave a comment if you're down for it! They really do mean a lot to me and keep me pumping this stuff out, ehe. 
> 
> Thanks for reading.
> 
> hazeism.tumblr.com


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